> Notes...

Saw “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (★★★★½) , finally (I once started to watch it, but didn’t go past the first minute or two, can’t remember why), and I loved it. Now I must read the book.

A user on Slashdot, referring to Steve Wozniak’s decision of selling his Apple stock, wrote: “Smart man. Great engineer. Bad decision. Happens to all of us.” To which Woz himself replied:

“I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.”

I wonder why Anthropic decided to pick a serif font for Claudine replies. The user prompt remains sans-serif. Whichever the reason might be, I don’t like it. I prefer sans-serif for this specific use case.

Schwab almost gave us a heart attack, when we say half of our account gone at the end of the trade day today. Then this “urgent” message popped:

Account balance information may be inaccurate.
“Certain online account information may be inaccurate. Please accept our apologies as our teams work to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. For assistance, please call us at 800-435-4000.”

Yo, mates, come on! 🩺

Some will say the weekend starts when you close the “work shop”. I see the start of the weekend as something unimportant, but agree with the previous. The real issue is how to slow it [the weekend] down. Its end? Ah, yes, when you clock in again.

Even though Haagen-Dazs reduced their 1 pint (16oz) to 14oz in 2009—yes, 16 years ago—there is an ongoing mention of it on social media as if it just happened. Taking things like this from social media as face value, as recent “news”, and without further research, is truly bad.

Truly enjoyed reading “Death and what comes next”. Some of the comments on its submission to Hacker News are food for the brain, and the closeted philosopher in me loves them!

“Astonishing”, said Death. “Really astonishing. Let me put forward another suggestion: that you are nothing more than a lucky species of ape that is trying to understand the complexities of creation via a language that evolved in order to tell one another where the ripe fruit was?”

➝ Via Hacker News.

While keeping my account active, I got rid of the Threads application on my mobile device, as a first step. Really tired to fine tunning notifications and still getting them, seemingly randomly, for things, or people I don’t know. Next step is to delete the account—which will also close my dormant Instagram.

This section from the NetBSD man page for the sleep command cannot be funnier, yet completely valid. I mean, quite useful if you have the time, right?

BUGS

     This sleep command cannot handle requests for durations much longer than
     about 250 billion years.  Any such attempt will result in an error, and
     immediate termination.  It is suggested that when there is a need for
     sleeps exceeding this period, the sleep command be executed in a loop,
     with each individual sleep invocation limited to 200 billion years
     approximately.

The sign on the road near my office reads “Men Working”, and you look carefully and find three women, and two men laboring. Is it “Men Working”, really?

My kid is one who often tells me, when I worry about his less-than-perfect password, “who cares, I have nothing to hide”. If you are one of those, please think again. I had a conversation, again, with the child about this last night.

“I find it fascinating when people say that they have nothing to hide. I usually jokingly say: unlock your phone and hand it to me. Your phone is a window to your life. Where a lot of people believe that it is possible to give full access to properly vetted authorities, in the world of security, when you open a door for one person, you incidentally open it to everyone.”

➝ Via Hacker News.

When I was in the military, I remember I once saw a fellow platoon mate wearing a nicely starched pass uniform (the one used when allowed to leave the base). On my next pass home I asked my mum if she could starch mine, which she did from there on. Today I recalled with love, and sadness, how much our parents (especially our mums) do for us throughout our lives. Waiting for “Mother’s Day”, or “Father’s Day”, to make mums and dads feel special doesn’t really cut it.

Yes, you guessed it right. It is currently raining cats and dogs. As with anything Florida, it will last a maximum of 1-2 hours, tops.

This guy is putting his nose—and face—on everything, everything that doesn’t pertain to him, nor anyone around him, and it’s truly bloody everything up. I can’t imagine how all of this will be unravelled.

Oh my gawd! This is an incident I didn’t know about, and I would have rather remained ignorant about it. Now can’t erase it from mind… I mean, it “went into passengers’ eyes, mouths, hair, and onto clothing and personal belongings, many of which were soaked”. Primordial shudders.

I know this is about business, yet, I still hear the question in my head, why? As presidencies are ephemeral, can’t Apple widthstand the rough seas for 3.5 years?

I have been watching “The Bear” with the kid (★★★★) . As you can see, I am liking it quite much, though at the very beginning I had serious doubts. The only reason I stuck with it was/is I am watching it with the kid. Patience and bonding paid off, alright. If it is included on wherever you get your streaming from, I recommend it. From the first episodes one of my favourite quotes:

“You’re watching the fire and you’re thinking, ‘If I don’t do anything, this place will burn down and all my anxiety will go away with it.’”

I empathise with that one so very much. It’s just, being inactive in cases like this is something I haven’t been able to do. But I digress. Watch it!

From George this morning on a message, as he told me “I was patiently waiting for the day 😂”. It went like this: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret!” You know from where that one comes, right? 😬😅😂

This is the first search result—at least for me—on Google when searching for “call bank of america”. A Google sponsored scam. Yup. 🤯

Update: 02 Oct 2025 @ 11:20:24

I reported this to Google, and it took them less than a day to remove it. It doesn’t show on my search results anymore. One down…

We wouldn’t need ad blockers if your ads weren’t obnoxius, privacy invasive, and tasteless. Now you want us to subscribe, or stop using ad blockers (or both!), so that you can be supported. See the cycle you have created? If I were to condone ads, I would for sure pick Carbon Ads.

Now $3,000 poorer, that double pain is behind me. To make me feel better, Mother Nature has decided to bless us with rain. She knows I love it. I only need some sleep. Soon.

Today is the “joyful” day for a non-cleaning related dental appointment. Oh, the “fun” we will have! Joy, joy, joy! 😬

Re-watching “Mr. Robot” (★★★★★) because it has been 10 years or so—where did the time go?!—since I last watched it. It is as awesome as I remember it.

Saw “Project Almanac” (★★½) with the kid last night. I wasn’t expecting anything good but, oh dear, it was worse than expected. I am being generous on my rating though, of course, your rating might differ from mine. IMDB gives it 3 stars, Rotten Tomatoes gives it 2. Yeah.

Nursing homes are sad places. If the elderly has good money, their nursing homes are less sad—but sad nevertheless. For the poor and dispossessed, they can be/are a living hell. When, or if I get to that stage, I wouldn’t want to be in one. I would want to terminate instead.

Re: Claudrod #1754143775

The biggest problem I see with Instagram (same pretty much with all Meta apps) is that without an account one can’t do much, if anything at all. I agree that to participate it is often recommended—though shouldn’t be required—having an account. But having to create an account, and login, just to view? Now, that’s meta! (no pun intended 🤭)

I am defeated by Hugo’s syntax highlighter. I don’t use code blocks much around here, but the few I have do not want to play nice, and show fonts with different sizes on desktop, and mobile. I haven’t been able to figure out, for the good of me, how to fix that weird behaviour. For now, the few code blocks I around have syntax highlighting turned off.

Update: 06 Oct 2025 @ 19:34:06

OMG! This guy is a saviour! In his own words:

“Lately, I’ve been coming across many blogs that have weird font-size rendering issues for code blocks on iOS. Basically, in a code snippet, the text-size would sometimes be much larger for some lines than others.”

Exactly my problem. Applied the fix he recommends and, boom, just like that, magic! Thank you, Nathan!

code {
    text-size-adjust: 100%;
    -ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;
    -moz-text-size-adjust: 100%;
    -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%;
}

I have to note that Niederegger Lubeck Classic Marzipan is—though pricey in the U.S.—super delicious. I am going to look around to see if I can find the other varieties they produce, as I would love to try them all!

Was just watching “The Penguin Lessons” (★★★★) , which I am rating even though I havent finished it—because The Horse urgently needed to know on what I spent some money almost a year ago, and I had to stop watching to search for receipts on my computer, because searching on the pocket (iPhone) one wasn’t rendering any results.

Update: 02 Oct 2025 @ 07:30:05

I just finished watching the movie, and I am revising my rating to 4 stars instead. It is a good movie, based on real events.

Feeling the urge to buy an ortholinear keyboard. If anything else, it is the uniformity, and compactness of it, that has enticed me. The search for one starts.

“hi <my GitHub nick>, I noticed you stargazed <repository I starred>. Seems like you’re interested in the same kind of productivity software. I’d love your feedback for <web page for product they are advertising>.”

Getting more and more of these type of emails. They must be getting that information from some kind of GitHub API, right? I mean, sometimes they are plainly inventing things, but sometimes they are right on the spot. Is GitHub selling us out? Microsoft would never do such thing, wouldn’t they?

“You might not need tmux”, said no one, until now. I don’t subscribe to that point of view, I use tmux heavily. The author’s solution? Install shpool, which adds yet another daemon. No, thank you, tmux is just fine. Heck, tmux is superb!

➝ Via Hacker News.

░▒▓ Having flashbacks to “simpler” times when Extended ASCII was used for just about everything—and yes, that included ASCII art ░▒▓

You’ve got to keep your subscription up! 😂 This cartoon from The New Yorker (one of the few sites still using “www”, I just noticed) made me laugh out loud. In a way, it reminded me of this one.

While on the topic of LLMs, I can’t stand “thinking” models. It is possible to set think to false on the CLI in Ollama for thinking models, but I haven’t found a way to set it as a variable. Their newly released application doesn’t have such feature. Granted, only DeepSeek and Qwen models are “thinkers”, so perhaps I will stop using them.

Providing an LLM a streamlined, but overall complete initial prompt is vital not to get perplexing answers. It will also greatly diminish the possibility of having the model astraying away, diluting the results. Though I believe this applies to all models, SaaS or local, it is specifically important when using local models, as processing and memory are more finite.

When we visited New York, we went to The Met. Ever since, and every once in a while, I get an email from them offering me membership. I would love to be a paying member, but what good is it to me, if I am near 1,000 miles away from it?

I have added the ability to use emoji as a note marker. For example, this one has a hammer and wrench emoji. It’s simply an entry on the front matter of the note. I will not abuse it, but I think it is going to be useful. If ends up not to be, removing it will be pretty simple, thanks to sed.

To speed up browsing on Chrome—yes, only available on Chrome at the moment—simply add these lines somewhere between your website’s <head>. Allegedly it provides “a near-instant loading experience”.

<script type="speculationrules">
  {
    "prerender": [{ "where": { "href_matches": "/*" }, "eagerness": "moderate" }],
    "prefetch": [{ "where": { "href_matches": "/*" }, "eagerness": "moderate" }]
  }
</script>

➝ Via Hacker News.

I mowed the lawn yesterday. Started at 16:00, and by 16:30 I had taken four breaks, and drank 5 bottles of water. I had to call it quits. The heat was truly unbearable; I thought I was going to faint. Waited until 19:30, and it was so much easier! Mental note: during summer, mow the lawn in the evenings.